Respectful, admiring, well-researched life of film actor Steve McQueen (1930-80), who packed two or three lives into his 50 years. First-time author Terrill (a dealer in Beatles memorabilia) strives to show the acting side of McQueen, explaining that, in many ways, the star's talent had to conform to the nature of the films he chose to be in, or the films that—in his early years—his agent urged upon him. Though Terrill rises above gossip-as- biography, he sounds star-struck when talking about McQueen's early films and rise to huge fame, weighing the actor's ego against that of Yul Brynner, from whom McQueen stole The Magnificent Seven. McQueen was aware of the absurdity of a reform-school graduate like himself becoming the world's highest-paid actor, and he was ever- grateful to Boys Republic, personally answering fan mail from inmates and leaving the school a bequest. A hyperenergized motorcycle and racing enthusiast, he couldn't keep from bouncing off the walls, nor was his surplus of nerves dampened by pot and cocaine, stronger drugs, or general satyriasis. For McQueen, womankind was one fantastic candy shop—though he denounced such behavior in print. Terrill repeats earlier biographers' surmises that McQueen's central hunger and erratic behavior stemmed from abandonment by his father and alcoholic mother, as well as from fear that his wealth was as unstable as his parents were. Conquest became a way of life, as did his need to controls his films and shape them to his image, even though he demanded less and less dialogue for himself in his scripts. Then McQueen tried to conquer McQueen, taking on Ibsen's An Enemy of the People in a film that got shelved but that today has a growing following. McQueen died of a heart embolism following what looked to be successful surgery for cancer. Definitive, yes, but less writerly than Penina Speigel's McQueen (1986) and not as moving as Neile McQueen Toffel's My Husband, My Friend (1986). (Photographs)
Pub Date: Jan. 26, 1994
ISBN: 1-55611-380-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Donald Fine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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